I’d just like to thank everyone for their help this semester! I really enjoyed the class and reading all your stories. It was a lot of fun!
If any of you are going to keep up with writing, you can always send me work you’d like to have critiqued!
Thanks!
–Emily
As I stare at the finished first draft of my story, I’ve been torn between what I’ve wanted to do for a chatroom-driven dialogue between two characters. At present, I have it designed so that the dialogue looks similar to what it would look like in a chat, with breaks in between for the character’s thoughts to be shown.
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Example:
Character 1: TEXT PLACEHOLDER
Character 2: TEXT PLACEHOLDER
Character 1: TEXT PLACEHOLDER
FIRST-PERSON THOUGHT PROCESS REGARDING CONVERSATION SO FAR PLACEHOLDER
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I was wondering if more people find it easier to be in a character’s head if we’re looking at the “screen” as though he/she were (as in the example above), or if it is better for the dialogue to be written in a standard format. As I’ll be e-mailing this in tomorrow, I would hope for some feedback today, but, will certainly be asking the same question next Thursday after people have read the story.
Comments, suggestions, etc., are appreciated. 
Writer’s block is an ugly thing most of us will experience someday. There’s been plenty of times I’ve been plagued by a nasty bout of writer’s block, having trapped myself in a scene with nowhere to go. There are many ways I try to work around it, and there’s quite a few exercises I’ve found that help. Art is a wonderful medium that I use often. I find a photography or painting I really love and try to write a background story to whatever I see happening. Make a character and a lifestyle relevant to the art. That’s an exercise I use quite often. And sometimes I make a character I end up really enjoying and writing more about! Another exercise I’ve grown to love is making a story to a certain song. The emotions and lyrics in a song can really inspire. That counts for instrumental music, also. I think instrumental is even better for the exercise sometimes, such as one of my favorite composers named Yiruma. It’s almost more complicated, because you don’t have the words to back up what the song could mean, you just have the score.
I also draw inspiration from other literature. Writing a small exercise on a poem you read can jog some things up.
Here are some pictures I’ve used to help me get started on some exercises (:
Lately, one of the hardest things, for me, is coming up with character names. In some cases, the name just comes to me, but now I feel like I’ve just got no clue what to name my main characters!
Like other writers I know, I use babynames for a lot of my naming woes, but are there any others out there that you guys would recommend? I want to be able to come up with unique names, and not just reuse names I’ve used in other stories.
What do you guys suggest?
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